Wordpress is very popular, it started out in blogging but has since grown to become much broader and extensible. There are two uses of WordPress, the company and the open source CMS. So you can have WordPress the company host your website or download the open source software and put it on your own host which could even be a home computer. The company makes it easy for anybody to create and maintain their own website, hosting it yourself obviously requires more tech proficiency though I think most PLUG members could handle it.

Yeah, I should have mentioned that. With the free version you have an address like http://username.wordpress.com instead of a proper domain name and they put advertising on your website.

Might not be a big deal for some but I think it looks amateurish personally (kind of like the old angelfire/geocities free websites).

But like you say, it's fine for trying out the service and you can always upgrade to a personal account for $4 a month if you decide to keep it and that removes the ads and lets you use a custom domain (which I think you still have to pay for separately).